A Shitty Night Out

Our next day off was pending and the need for a new deckhand to take the watch whilst we went out and got pissed became dire. Moreover, one stupid and greedy enough to slog through the intensity of life on The Good Ship. Cue Sam.

Sam arrived at the boat shortly after we pulled into port in the South of France, bright eyed and bushy tailed. And ginger.

‘Do you smell fox’s wee?’ I whispered to Kay, and we snickered unfairly as we left the boat. For the first time ever, the crew went their separate ways for their day and a half off. Kay and a friend dropped me off at my hotel and continued up into the mountains. Mario took up a suite in the Marriot for the night, the Leader went home to his swank apartment where his parents were visiting from the North Pole, and Mini Me got drunk and retired early. And who cares about Gale.

Two days later we reconvened on the boat for a normal pre-charter work day. Now whilst we’re accustomed to the outlandish crew behaviour which transpires when we’re let off the leash, the following story tops that of Mario parking his car in the middle of the street and stealing someone’s wheelchair. Feeling a bit of separation anxiety (Stockholm Syndrome), Mini Me and Mario decided to join the Leader and his crumblies for several hundred bottles of rosé on his terrace, followed by a night on the town. By the time they left the apartment, Mini was so wankered that she had to be carried most of the way by the Leader’s mum, who was only slightly less inebriated than her. She proceeded to drop her purse every hundred metres, spilling it’s contents over the pavement, which then had to then be picked up by Mario, who was so drunk it was like watching a bull pick up pennies. She was promptly put in a taxi upon arrival. Mario was the next to go and he departed on foot, although he found himself unable to locate his hotel and vexed with some irritable bowels. Left with no other option than to relieve himself in a parking lot, he found a seemingly suitable spot between two cars and dropped his drawers. In the very most crucial moment of his unpleasant poop, he was suddenly caught in the headlights of the gendarmerie, which was followed by the deafening blast of the police siren. This gave him enough of a fright in his compromised state that he would’ve shit himself were he not already in the act of doing so. Eager to avoid any run-ins with the law, Mario promptly fled the scene clutching the front of his jeans to keep them up and the rear to avoid them making contact with his bum, and the po-po in hot pursuit. As the story goes, a chase ensued that involved scaling fences and hiding behind corners, and what he described as one particularly dramatic dive through some bushes, which landed him quite accidentally in front of the steps to his hotel. He got up, dusted himself off, picked the wedgie from his butt cheeks, and strolled into the Marriott.

We all stared at him in horror.

‘Don’t worry’, he added proudly ‘I threw away my pants’.

Jack Be Quick

‘I go’a do wot?’ asked Jack, frowning so concertedly that the furrow in his brow was as deep and hard as Tony Hawkins’ butt.

‘Take out the trash’, I answered.

He looked back at me from under what he called his ‘Riviera look’, which was essentially a gelled up hairstyle that he used a hair dryer to achieve.

‘Dude, I can’t even lift it. Besides, it’s your job’ I continued, ‘you know, work?’

The concept of hard work was lost on our slothful friend who spent his nights DJ-ing and days sleeping before he decided to try his hand at yachting. Up until now the crew had gone easy on the lad as he transitioned into the life of working for his money, and he passed as much time onboard as he could pretending to look busy and finding any excuse to go flirt with Charlie. God, I could even hear them flirting in my sleep. I could even hear them flirting in their sleep. But now that Charlie had moved on and Mini Me had returned, he had lost his will to live (onboard). 

He ran his fingers through his hair, his gold Casio catching the light.

‘Just take out the fucking trash and don’t forget to put a bag back in’, I said walking out.

So as Kay and I had initially predicted, it was no surprise when Jack handed in his notice after just three weeks. He spent the rest of his time onboard counting down the hours and obsessively unlocking his iPhone to look at his screensaver of a pair of tits, self-snapped and sent from a dolly-bird back home. Good help is so hard to find.

Dramarama!

‘Bella, Bella, Gale’.

I rolled my eyes and wondered what he could possibly want from me, since we’d only just rotated engineers the day before and he’d been onboard a mere 24 hours. I sighed and answered my radio, ‘Go ahead, Gale’.

‘When you have a minute, will you come down to the control room please?’

I already knew what it was about.

‘Is it urgent, I’m kinda busy?’ I lied.

‘That’s why I said, when you have a minute’, he spat over the radio.

I decided that I didn’t have a minute and took my sweet-ass time fixing up the cabins. About 50 minutes later, still without any intention of going to the control room, my made my way down to the crew mess to make myself a tea. Lo and behold, there I found Gale with his arms folded across his chest, frantically pacing up and down.

‘Ah,’ I exclaimed, ‘there you are. I was just about...’

‘Can you come to the control room please’, he cut me off mid sentence.

I was going to wind him up more, but decided to alter my approach and said, ‘Sure. What do you need?’ I was starting to enjoy myself.

‘Just come to the control room please’, he repeated through gritted teeth.

‘No problem’, I said, and began to make my way to the control room with him goose-stepping behind me like a Hitlerjugend, only fatter.

‘I really am busy, Gale, what is so important that I need to do this now?’

‘I need you to open an attachment for me.’

I stopped dead halfway down the deck and turned to face him. ‘Seriously? An attachment? You can’t even open up a file? You’re an engineer for godssakes, I’m sure you can figure it out. Or get one of the boys to help you, they’re sitting on their arses.’

He was starting to get very annoyed that his big take-down, which he had clearly played out in his mind, wasn’t going according to plan.

‘No, I want you to do it okay. Just do it.’ He whined commandingly.

I turned around, muttered the words ‘timewaster’ and continued across the deck, down the stairs, and into the control room where his computer sat. Once we were both in the room he leant back on the wall and crossed his arms across his chest, feigning nonchalance.

‘Open it’, he smirked, cocking his head in the direction of the computer.

‘Gale, I can see from here it’s a link to my blog, and I’m not gonna open it’, I stated matter-of-factly.

‘Open it’, he smirked again.

‘Yeah. That’s not gonna happen’. I shrugged.

He bolted upright, now fuming that not only had I foiled his big reveal, but that he now too was not getting his way. ‘I already know all about it, Magnus told me everything! I have a right to know what was in it if it’s about me!’ he yapped.

‘Firstly, you know about it because I told you yesterday that I wrote a blog that you featured in and I apologised for not asking you first’, I replied calmly. ‘And secondly, you don’t have a right to know what is in my private writing, none whatsoever. I, on the other hand, have a right to write about whatever and whomever I want. These two things are called the right to privacy and freedom of speech. You can have a gander at those if you’re so desperate for a read. And if you have a problem with it, take it up with the Leader, I’m going to go do my work’.

‘Oh no you’re not!’, he threatened, and called the Leader over the radio. The Leader, who anticipated Magnus’ bean-spilling and the fiasco to come, was there faster than you can say ‘gorilla’. I’m pretty sure he was waiting outside the door. Before the Leader could open his mouth, Gale demanded that he make me open my page.

‘Unfortunately, I can’t make Bella do that’, he reasoned. ‘My belief is that she has written things for her friends and family to read, and there is no law that...’

‘So you’re not going to make her do it?’ he interrupted, one of the Leader’s pet peeves.

‘Gale,’ the Leader started again, ‘unfortunately I have no right...’

‘Well, great. That’s just great!’ he disrupted again, and spun around on his heels to leave. Regrettably for Gale, he spun around with such point-proving gusto that his first step in the opposite direction landed off beam, giving him a case of the wobblies, and he tripped over the Jet Ski bed. A glare from the Leader caught my laughter short and my grin melted rapidly from my lips. He righted himself with a few steps and stormed out hastily, probably in search of a tampon.

I looked at the Leader both amusedly and apologetically.

He patted me on the back and commented, ‘You really do cause me a lot of shit, you know’.

‘I know’, I admitted apologetically.

We later found out that when Leader sought out Gale to do some damage control, he had locked himself in the 40°C engine room and wouldn’t come out.

A Gull with Gall

‘I hate Capri’, snorted Mario as we were dropping anchor, and I wondered if he was talking about the same beautiful island of the Amalfi Coast of Italy that I was currently looking at.

‘Full of fucking seagulls’, he ended.

Hours later he spilled down the stairs like a mad man. ‘Give me something to throw, like an orange, I’m gonna kill it!’ he yelled as he grabbed the first piece of fruit he could find and stumbled back up the stairs. We were still questioning what had just happened when he stomped back into the crewmess mumbling, ‘Fucking seagulls. Teach you a fucking lesson I will... Shit on my tender. Fucking seagulls. I hate hat Capri’.

We watched him in silence as he pulled out the medical kit and broke a handful of Alka Seltzer tabs into pieces, still mumbling. He then grabbed a loaf of sliced bread and started covering the pieces of Alka Seltzer in it. Slowly recognition set in. Mini Me, who was still standing holding the iron poised from Mario’s first entrance, eyed him suspiciously and finally questioned in her somewhat ‘posh’ Essex accent, ‘Are you trying to blow up birds?’

Mario seemed to suddenly become aware of Mini Me, Kay, Jack, Magnus and myself watching his performance. He described the scenario of how he had exited the side door and just as he was about to light a cigarette he looked up to see the bird sitting on the 8 metre boat that he cleans several times a day. In that moment, he said, the bird turned to look at him, made eye contact, and pooped all over the cushions. He started bellowing profanities at the bird and waving his arms frantically in a bid to chase it away, to which the bird coolly looked back over, look a step to the left, and pooped again. It was at this point when he flew into a blind rage and sought out a projectile from the crew mess. He further explained the lack of regurgitating abilities of gulls in general, and how the gull washing down his tasty Alka Seltzer treat with water was something akin to sealing a Mentos in a Coke bottle. With that he echoed another slew of vulgarities, swooped up about a dozen heavily breaded pellets and exited the crew mess. We all looked at one another in silence for a few moments.

‘I’m gonna go watch.’ I announced.

‘Me too!’ chimed Kay, and we both scrambled off our seats, leaving Mini Me to her ironing and her distress. We made our way to the swim platform where we found Mario yelling into the night, and couldn’t only just make out the birds floating on the water by the red reflection of the flood lights in their eyes.

‘Fucking devil birds! Raaaaaaaa!’, he shrieked, as he tossed more pellets in their direction. I could have imagined him less mad had I found him naked on the bow howling at the moon with a bag of popcorn. Kay and I started to giggle and the more distressed he became, the harder we laughed, until he was eventually throwing pellets so hard and far that he nearly threw himself into the water.

‘They’d be all over that shit if it was just normal bread!’ he eventually laughed too as he wiped the spittle away from his mouth and came back to his senses. Later he showed us this video: